The topic of the John McCain memorial in Vietnam came up recently. Biden was friends with top neocon John McCain, and even eulogized at his funeral. Kamala Harris concluded her 2021 trip to Vietnam by visiting the Hanoi memorial site where John McCain’s plane was shot down in 1967. He was held as a prisoner of war for over half a decade until his release in 1973. Harris placed flowers at the memorial site where a team of photographers captured the seemingly somber, masked Harris. The problem is that the memorial is in honor of McCain’s captors – NOT John McCain!
McCain was seen as a war criminal by the Vietnamese people. The memorial is NOT in honor of John McCain, but in honor of those who captured a high-profile neocon. “The citizens and military caught Pilot John Sidney McCain,” the statue’s engraving says. “This was one of 10 aircraft shot down that same day.” McCain himself thought the monument was a shrine to his achievements and believed that the Vietnamese people held him in high regard. They hate him.
Vietnamese tour guides will happily take unknowing Americans to the memorial. It was a big attraction after his death. However, the truth of the matter is that the shrine is to honor the Vietnamese fighters. It would be akin to visiting Pearl Harbor to honor the brave Japanese pilots. As one TripAdvisor review states, “This is not a tribute .. it is a humiliation to McCain but he was so ignorance not to know that. He was probably happy about it too . VN could have just left his name out but no, they had to put his name there just to add more insults.”
